Tag Archives: Ant

Obscure Ant build errors

I’ve been using Eclipse at work now, the first time I’ve done more than toy with it.  Along with Eclipse are the attendant tools – Ant, Maven, TomCat and ClearCase (oh yes, ClearCase).

So, Ant. I came across a situation where the build was failing to deploy the WAR files to TomCat, with the following error:

build.xml:887: java.net.UnknownHostException: C

Not much use there.  As it turns out, the solution was both simple and cripplingly unintuitive: replace “file://” with “file:///”.  The extra slash makes all the difference.

For example:

Replace:

war="file://${dist.dir}/app.war"

With:

war="file:///${dist.dir}/app.war"